Wordle

Here's a fun "word cloud" I made of Pass the Rubicon from the site Wordle.

An Eye-opener

Yesterday J and I went to go see a movie with some friends. I had suggested the new Indiana Jones movie, but my friend suggested a documentary, and since Indy tickets are hard to get (official opening is next weekend and this weekend was a special preview) I agreed to see "Black Gold" (see trailer below), a movie about an Ethiopian coffee cooperative of farmers and how the world price is set for something I, personally, drink every morning.

Actually, I was already aware of most of these issues before seeing the film. I've also bought Fair Trade coffee before, or bought from cooperatives at international fairs to get coffee from Uganda, Laos, Colombia and other bean growers. The thing I liked about this movie was that they focused on one group, in Ethiopia, and did a good job at explaining the issues, particularly the point that Africa needs more "trade", not just "aid".

Can you spell copyright?

Just in case you couldn't get enough of Free Rice, here's another way to dedicate a few hours of your life: Scrabulous.com


Just hurry up, because Hasbro has been alerted to the site since it became widely popularized on Facebook, and is gearing up for a lawsuit. Hear more on that from NPR:
The End of Scrabulous? (Jan 14)

and here: Hasbro Urged to Buy Rogue Scrabble Site (Jan 15)

Free Rice

Recently the featured Story of the Day on NPR, this website will improve your vocabulary AND help to donate food to the UN World Food Program. Give it a try:

http://www.freerice.com/index.php

Warning: may be addictive :p

Brain exercise

In the book Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, a dystopia blooms from the mind of Crake, a biotech genius who creates a hybrid lifeform to replace humans. When Crake was younger, he and a playmate, Jimmy, used to play a game where they would list the scientific classification of species for fun: Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, subphylum, Class, subclass, Order, suborder, Family, subfamily, Genus, Species.

Given the difficulty of remembering this order as is, a popular mnemonic is:
Do Koalas Prefer Chocolate Or Fruit, Generally Speaking?

I tried to think of my own, including the sub-categories as well, and came up with this:
Demure Kings Play stalemate Chess strategies, Oligarchies step in, Formalize sovereign Gentry Snobbery.

Mnemonics, however, are probably better when they are simple and quirky, i.e. koala food preferences. Anyone want to try their hand at it? Leave a comment :)

Bath Nation

I don't think any other country has quite as much fun in the bathtub as the Japanese do. The Japanese suggest 12 home bath brews, one for each month of the year.

This month, November, is the "mikan-yu", or tangerine bath.

This is about the time of year that the Japanese start eating this small citrus fruit and spend the evening sitting under their kotatsu (low, heated tables) watching television. So maybe it's no surprise that the sweet aroma of the mikan fruit would find its way to the bath waters. According to a Japanese website, Yu-no-Kuni (meaning something akin to 'Bath Nation'), one should take the peels of about 20 mikan and dry them. Then wrap the dried skins in a cotton gauze bag (or thin towel) and drop it in the bath.
And just to show you how seriously the Japanese take bathing (move over rubber ducky), take a look at this graph:

The graph is from a study done by the Tokyo Gas Company to measure how well the skin holds heat in the bath. In regular bath water, represented by the lower, blue line, the skin heats up by only a fraction and then loses that heat rather quickly. In comparison, with a tangerine bath, the surface of the skin gains nearly 3 degrees Celsius (about 5 degrees Fahrenheit) and maintains heat for about 50 minutes. Amazing research and I hope the scientists all took a long, hot bath after they published their results.
But there's no need to make a science project out of it. Enjoy some tangerines (mikan are also known as satsuma oranges) and save the skins for the bath. Mikan skins even have a special name in Japanese - chinpi - and they can be used to make a cleaning solution too. Boil 400cc of water and 4 chinpi and then have at it. I suppose you could even use it to clean the bath tub.

Trip to Nagano

On the 20th through the 21st, J and I went to Nagano Prefecture with 11 of my former classmates from K.University for a weekend in a solar and wind powered "zero-oil" cabin up in the mountains. Pictures say a thousand words, so here's a link to about 70,000 words :p

Playing your cards right

Over the weekend I finally made the first move. Honestly, I had been putting it off long enough and it was time to get down to business. I decided it was high time to put some regular exercise in my weekly schedule and join a gym.
So on Saturday I did a search for gyms located near my office which would be open early enough for me to fit in a morning workout (I know, a lofty goal indeed!). Luckily I found one that is not only near my office, but one that has another branch nearby home, and they allow members to use all their branches freely. I figure this will be good for working out on the weekends.

I visited the one near my home on Saturday afternoon and took a look. After a short tour by one of their staff, I met with the manager who explained the membership system to me, i.e. where the other locations are, the free towel with every visit, that sort of thing. I told him everything sounded great, but I would visit the location near my office during the week and then decide. He said that would be no problem, although he hoped I would return to his branch when I signed up.

Today I went at 8:00 am to see what the gym near my office was like, choosing that time to see how crowded it might be, and thus how easy it would be to get a treadmill or bicycle, etc. I was happy to find only about 4 or 5 people there, and the staff who gave me the tour said that was common for weekday mornings. Then I met with the staff member who was supposed to give me the spiel about the membership system, but I told her that I had already gotten the details from my visit to the other location, and would probably join over the weekend when I had more time to fill out the forms.

It was at that point that I was told, very kindly, that by all means I was welcome to join from any location, but they would be very happy if I joined from their branch.

"Membership is the same no matter where I join, right?" I inquired.
"Certainly. You can use any of the locations no matter where you join. However, maybe I can talk to the manager here. He might be willing to offer you a slight discount for joining at this location."

*Ah, the cards were on the table!*

What else could I do but play along? Afterall, I truly was planning to join at the location near my house over the weekend. "Well, I'm planning to join this weekend. Here is my phone number, so have your manager call me in the evening before the weekend if he would like to offer something of that nature."

I figure I have nothing to lose no matter where I join, but they seem to have something to gain... so I might as well have something to gain by being persuaded one way or the other. Actually, since I will use the location near my office more often, I might as well join there, and I was quite happy to hear the suggestion to do so.

In any case, I should be able to remain active over the coming fall and winter months, and the gym (both locations) seem to be very pleasant.